THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 9, 1996 TAG: 9601090241
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
``Watch your step, old one!'' a colleague called as I was placing the ball of my foot on the icy walk.
``Ta ta!'' I cried, ``don't worry about - ''
``Me,'' I was going to say but I shot skyward in a wild whirl Nijinski would have envied and fell in the arms of a portly shrub.
The way you walk on ice, you lift your right foot high, like an elephant, and lower it gently flat on the ground. Then, you lift your left foot and place it by the right one.
It only takes 15 minutes to make your way 30 feet to the front door but you arrive upright.
Roughly the same care gets you five miles down the interstate in one piece. As I started driving west about midnight at Independence Boulevard, bound for Wards Corner, the road seemed ice-free; yet traffic was moving at a stately 30 miles an hour.
Every now and then a driver scooted by at 45, but what dissuaded me from that speed was the sight of two wrecks on the roadside and radio reports of collisions.
Every so often, a patrol car up ahead would turn its blue light to flashing, as if saying, Slow down, buster, plenty of time to get there! Whereupon the one doing 45 would slink into the mainstream at 30.
And a good thing, too, because, rounding a bend, we found a long line of red taillights of cars waiting for a wreck to be sorted out far ahead.
I took an exit to Military Highway where cars were crawling, sensibly, at 15 miles an hour and even so, now and then, you''d feel your wheels sliding a bit.
You hear cocky drivers saying people in the South tense up trying to maneuver in snow. Maybe so, but speeding on one patch of ice can turn a road into a disaster area.
Walking the dog that night, I came upon a trio of snow statues - mother, father, child - gleaming pale in the dark. A dozen children from five families - the Glassers, Bernsteins, Finks, Leons and the Diamonsteins - had built them in the mid-morning rain, a standing denial of my column Monday which said no snowmen enlivened the snowscape.
To deepen my ignominy, Carol Fallaize of Virginia Beach called Monday to protest my pronouncing snow angels a ``fairly new'' phenomenon. She and her parents and their parents had created them in the snow in Maine, she noted.
``You lie on your back in the snow, your hands at your sides, and then raise them over your head two or three times to create the image of wings.'' Immigrants from European nations brought the diversion to America.
On one thing, however, I was right. The so-called blizzard loosened its grip in skirting metropolitan Norfolk while devastating other urban areas on the Northeast coast.
All we got was sloppy snow on Sunday and a dusting of fine, dry snow on Monday. Once again, others bit the bullet we missed.
Monday the sun broke through. by CNB